How Basketball Can Save the World by David Hollander

Author:David Hollander [Hollander, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harmony/Rodale
Published: 2023-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

THE BLACK TAX

Systemic racism remains America’s unreconciled original sin. Its cruelty and complexity have been compounded over four hundred years of slavery, Jim Crow, conscious and unconscious bias, police violence, and incarceration. Even in a “free” American society, racial barriers to access are formidable, in that they are societal and institutional, visible and invisible. Generationally, this amounts to a deficit.

It is an appreciable “Black tax” that stifles Black economic mobility. From racial covenants to redlining to high mortgage denial rates, if you’re Black there are barriers to owning a home. In neighborhoods where there is Black home ownership, it’s harder to keep that home as “urban renewal” results in gentrification demolishing black communities, including homes and Black owned businesses, which decreased by 41 percent in 2020 alone.

It’s harder to get a business loan when you’re Black. It’s harder to get a job interview, which makes it harder to elevate Blacks to the C-suite. And without corporate Black leadership there are higher turnover and attrition rates among Black employees, resulting in entrenched, layered structural inequality that becomes harder and harder to deconstruct.

Voter suppression laws throw up barriers to Black political representation. Because of the racial wealth gap, there are lower overall political donations from African Americans to support Black interests. Laws don’t change. Blacks suffer from a disproportionate healthcare disadvantage, leading to worse health and less education, which perpetuates the cycle of disadvantage. All these barriers make it nearly impossible to create or sustain African American generational wealth.

It’s not a gap but a chasm of privilege, another world of access—or more accurately, lack of access—experienced by Blacks in America. Denial of access is necessarily the denial of ownership. And has not the issue of ownership been central to the African American experience: ownership of the body, ownership of civil rights, ownership of economic self-determination?

In the realm of basketball, we see the African American assertion of ownership in ways not seen much elsewhere, defying systemic racism. The premise of basketball was and is systemic access. To remedy the racial ownership gap, we must fundamentally equalize access, removing barriers that are cumulative, generational, and inherently structural.

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